iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 16/09/2026

It was a blast presenting on "Teaching Python with Positron" at #positconf2026. @posit.co knows how to do a data science conference. Thanks to my son Joseph for helping me put together some fun, human-made illustrations. lnkd.in/g-Y36kbk

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Thinking about how this might go Listener: My chains aren't converging Andrew: Your model is bad Aki: Your parameterization is bad Richard: The Buddha teaches us that numerical integration is suffering

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Julia Silge @juliasilge.com · 18/09/2025

It was such a pleasure to speak today at #PositConf2025 about how BADLY 😱 it went when I tried to learn Python ~10 years ago, and how tooling in the ecosystem has changed (gotten better!) in the intervening decade. You can check out my slides at: juliasilge.github.io/get-unstuck-...

juliasilge.github.io

How I got unstuck with Python

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 16/07/2025

It’s been a lot of fun working on this project and connecting marketing methodology with my political science roots.

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 14/06/2025

There are a lot of introductions to Python, but this one is mine. It includes a walkthrough of using uv for environment management, Polars for data wrangling, seaborn.objects for visualization, and scikit-learn for modeling. #rstats #python #pydata

occasionaldivergences.com

An introduction to Python for R users – Occasional Divergences

This introduction to Python assumes you know R, which is used as an analogy to explain Python for data analysis.

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 12/04/2025

Headed back home after a whirlwind visit! Logan is a gorgeous city and USU is doing really neat work with teaching data analytics

The Hunstman School of Business at Utah State University

Big bowl of Aggie ice cream in a waffle cone bowl

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 21/02/2025

PyData Northern Utah is partnering with HackUSU for a special in-person meetup: An introduction to Python dashboards using polars, seaborn.objects, and Quarto: www.meetup.com/pydata-north...

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 27/01/2025

For our first PyData Northern Utah meetup of 2025, we are continuing to look at a data wrangling tools with @healthandstats.bsky.social as guide. For anyone in and around Cache Valley, join our Northern Utah chapter at www.meetup.com/pydata-north...

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 09/01/2025

Python ignorance validated. I didn't realize there was a kernel selection option inside the Jupyter notebook. Thanks for the assist, @juliasilge.com.

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Elea McDonnell Feit @eleafeit.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Lots of folks are discovering the relevance of decision theory to the practical problem of analyzing an A/B. A quick🧵

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 02/12/2024

Woohoo, our paper is live! This haiku summarizes it best: Raw model results? Stop! Hard to understand! Use {marginaleffects}

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Posit @posit.co · 31/10/2024

No trick, all treats - posit::conf(2024) talks are now on YouTube! 🍬 Over a thousand people gathered in Seattle and online to dive into all things open-source data science. With 100+ talks, there's a lot to explore! Check out the playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... #RStats #Python

posit conf 2024 talk recordings and workshop materials

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 11/11/2024

This administrative attack on the nonprofit sector fits with a pattern of authoritarian restrictions on civil society that's been going on for the past decade+ @suparnac.bsky.social and I (and others) have done a bunch of research on this from an intl/comparative perspective #nonprofitsky #polisky 🧵

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Julia Silge @juliasilge.com · 14/10/2024

My first screencast in quite a while! Take a first look at how to use #Positron, the new data science IDE I have been working on, for data analysis with #rstats, using this week's #TidyTuesday dataset on orca encounters 🐳 youtu.be/5BojM5EciPs

youtu.be

First look at Positron, exploring orca encounters

YouTube video by Julia Silge

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Julia Silge @juliasilge.com · 28/10/2024

We've got a brand new, baby website for Positron! Take a look if you are interested in getting started, and please let us know how it goes: positron.posit.co

positron.posit.co

Positron

A next-generation data science IDE

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 06/09/2024

Just discovered the Causal Quartet by @lucystats.bsky.social, @travisgerke.bsky.social, and @malcolmbarrett.malco.io: four datasets that have the same unadjusted casaul relationship between treatment/outcome but different true effects. This is great for teaching DAG-based causal inference! #rstats

Four scatterplots showing the same relationship four four datasets, all showing a slope of 1, but in reality they all have different true slopes that can only be uncovered through proper statistical adjustment

Four common DAGs: a collider, a confounder, a mediator, and M-bias

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 15/08/2024

Okay, I’ll bite: How do you read so much?!

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James Balamuta @coatless.bsky.social · 23/07/2024

George Stagg just released a new #quarto extension that allows for an embedded full feature code editor inside of Quarto slide deck! It supports both #rstats via #webr and #python via #pyodide. Announcement: mastodon.social/@gws@mstdn.s... Extension: github.com/r-wasm/quart...

github.com

GitHub - r-wasm/quarto-drop: Drop down an interactive R or Python console, code editor, and plotting window from the top of your Quarto slides.

Drop down an interactive R or Python console, code editor, and plotting window from the top of your Quarto slides. - r-wasm/quarto-drop

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 23/07/2024

President Venn Diagram xkcd.com/2962

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 16/07/2024

The International Society for Bayesian Analysis tells me Statistical Rethinking has won the 2024 DeGroot Prize for its contributions to "statistical inference, decision theory and statistical applications". This is huge honor especially given the previous winners who have influenced me so much.

Winners of the DeGroot Prize

2021
Nicolas Chopin and Omiros Papaspiliopoulos (2020). An Introduction to Sequential Monte Carlo. Springer.

2019
Subhashis Ghosal and Aad van der Vaart. Fundamentals of Nonparametric Bayesian Inference. Cambridge University Press.

2017
David Banks, Jesus Rios, and David Rios Insua. Adversarial Risk Analysis. CRC Press.

2015
Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern, David B. Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Donald B. Rubin. Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition. CRC Press.

2013
Noel Cressie and Christopher Wikle (2011). Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data. John Wiley and Sons.

Kevin P. Murphy (2012). Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective. MIT Press.

2011
Jay Kadane (2011). Principles of Uncertainty. CRC Press.

2009
Giovanni Parmigiani and Lurdes Inoue (2009). Decision Theory: Principles and Approaches. John Wiley and Sons.

Carl Edward Rasmussen and Christopher K. I. Williams (2006). Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning (freely availa

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 08/07/2024

New blog post! Read about Posit's new Positron editor, see some of the neat new features it has, and check out the settings and extensions I use. It includes a bonus workaround for connecting to a remote server with SSH! #rstats

andrewheiss.com

Fun with Positron | Andrew Heiss

Combine the best of RStudio and Visual Studio Code in Posit’s new Positron IDE

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James Balamuta @coatless.bsky.social · 03/07/2024

#positron IDE beta has been updated since last week! Two nice changes: 1. Quarto Extension (not the CLI) is now bundled; and, 2. Prelim support for #polars in data explorer A full list of changes can be viewed using GitHub's compare url with tags. github.com/posit-dev/po...

A screenshot showing the Positron IDE GitHub Release page with new tag updates since it was just released.

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 03/07/2024

You tried to hold us back, but humanity has *got* to be free to explore!

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James Balamuta @coatless.bsky.social · 02/07/2024

Some dueling long-haul (~30min+) videos exploring the #Positron IDE for data wrangling and visualization. Both videos look at the new data explorer, plotting capabilities, projects, and graph support. #rstats: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jhT... #Python: www.youtube.com/watch?v=izaZ...

youtube.com

Positron doing Data Analysis with R (Public Beta)

Timeline00:00 Intro00:25 Select R as the interpreter from the upper right corner.00:40 View the usual R startup message in the lower-left window.00:50 Discus...

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 02/07/2024

Yeah, this was my whole reason for writing that blog post. It's simple, but just me trying to grok all this as an RStudio user.

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 02/07/2024

Sure thing! It's not much, but hopefully it's helpful.

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James Balamuta @coatless.bsky.social · 28/06/2024

~3 minute-long video looking at #positron's #rstats debugging capabilities. In short: browser() and traceback() are supported with a nice explorer. Positron engages the debug mode with red outline. Care is needed when engaging debugger. No script breakpoints yet (?) youtu.be/p_4ZS-nnQ2Q

youtu.be

Positron Debugger for R Demo with Nested Functions (Public Beta)

This is a quick demo video showing how the Positron R debugger works. In short, it primarily uses `browser()` and has support for `traceback()`. When the er...

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 28/06/2024

Underrated. It was a delight to go back and rewatch last year.

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 27/06/2024

HELLO POSITRON #rstats Read about it: www.infoworld.com/article/3715... Download it: github.com/posit-dev/po...

Screenshot of Posit's new R + Python IDE

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 02/05/2024

You can remove mine! I presented today.

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 20/03/2024

Yeah, I end up using geom_point + geom_errorbarh.

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 20/03/2024

ICYMI StanCon '24 Sept 10-12 at the Oxford School of Witchcraft and Probabilistic Programming, now accepting proposals for contributed talks and tutorials. Hope to see Stan stans there #stats

mc-stan.org

StanCon 2024

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 20/03/2024

Is it still doing that thing where it only recognizes the folder that it’s in as the working directory?

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 27/02/2024

Goodhart’s Law xkcd.com/2899

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Bob C-J and Geoff Cumming @thenewstats.bsky.social · 24/02/2024

@mjskay.com has an official paper out for the ggdist package in R: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37883271/ ggdist provides powerful tools for visualizing uncertainty. the paper has examples, lessons about package development, and can help you better understand grammar of graphics. #StatSky #rstats

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 01/02/2024

Spot on. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed students swapping CSV with CVS before this semester.

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Posit @posit.co · 24/01/2024

Quarto 1.4 has been released 🎉 The release brings new formats for dashboards and Typst, a new manuscript project type, a cross-reference overhaul, Shiny for Python support, and a ton of other updates. Learn more on the Quarto blog: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

quarto.org

Quarto - Quarto 1.4

Quarto 1.4 brings new formats for dashboards and Typst, a new manuscript project type, a cross-reference overhaul, Shiny for Python support, and a ton of other updates.

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 24/01/2024

There’s a good chance that I get to teach a course in causal inference in my new gig. What are the must-haves for a modern causal inference course? Especially for an audience that is primarily trained in ML techniques?

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Marc Dotson @marcdotson.com · 22/01/2024

I'm excited to announce that I've accepted a position at Utah State starting this Fall. I'll be mentoring students in the Analytics Solutions Center in addition to the usual professorial responsibilities, and I couldn't be happier about it.

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